Thankfully you can stop panicking. Salvation is here. I’ve written it – the definitive unbiased election analysis. Are you ready? Here goes nothing: This election sucks now oh god oh god please let this godforsaken election be over it is driving everyone in New Zealand insane.

This is the second election in a row I’ve spent overseas. Last time I was in a small French village. Watching Dirty Politics was like seeing someone tap into a gushing wellspring of pure diarrhoea: you couldn’t look and you couldn’t look away wanted to flee the area, hide in a bomb shelter and cry for the rest of your life. It was terrible, and everyone involved in Dirty Politics deserved to be broken on the wheel or something, but from 20,000km away it also looked like 4.5 million people cataloguing a collective nervous breakdown via Facebook blog.

This time I’m in London. The descent into madness began with a trickle of disagreement. Then a small stream of rage. Now it’s a raging torrent of spiritual dysfunction. Maybe you’re thinking “this election hasn’t driven me to the brink of madness”. Bad news: “I haven’t been driven to the brink of madness” is exactly what someone who’s been driven to driven to the brink of madness would think.

The evidence is everywhere. Comments on the Stuff Facebook page, which are normally a notch better than messages smeared in poop on a cell wall, are now several notches worse than messages smeared in poop on a cell wall. After the news site posted video of Jacinda Ardern briefly being overcome with emotion while speaking to the families of people who had committed suicide, hundreds of people took the time to say she was faking her tears to win the crucial “still retains a trace of humanity” vote.

Here is a quote from Stuff commenter Shitty McShitterson [NAME CHANGED FOR LEGAL REASONS]. “What a show. When you consider how the Labour Government of the 1980s drove decent people to suicide or caused them to die of heart attacks. Jacinda really knows how to feign sincerity.”

But of course things are bad at terrible person Ground Zero. Still, the sickness is spreading. A number of my friends on Facebook have taken to posting TOP videos. TOP is consistently polling between 1 and 2%. Here are two things that’ll be just as impactful as voting for TOP:

Flushing your voting papers down the toilet.

Writing all of Gareth Morgan’s offensive tweets on the back of your voting papers and then flushing them down the toilet.

The right-wing bias neoliberal MSM is suffering too. Patrick Gower is speaking only in sentences entirely composed of alliterated adjectives.

Even the politicians are hating their lives. I asked a National source whether everyone in the party thinks the election sucks. “Are you wanting something on or off the record?” he replied, which means they secretly think it sucks.

Labour didn’t reply, which means they also think it sucks, despite feeling unfamiliar pangs of a forgotten emotion known as hope, and its sister emotion, terror that everything will go wrong.

Meanwhile, the whole country’s emotions are swinging wildly based on the results of wildly swinging polls. A large host of left-wingers are somehow living with the cognitive dissonance of uncritically accepting every poll that shows Labour in the lead and reflexively dismissing every poll that shows National in the lead as inaccurate because they only surveylandlines, people.

Everyone is angry. I long for the days when we only hated each other with the burning intensity of 500 suns. I almost even long for when we just wanted David Seymour to stop saying things and doing politics rather than die in an exploding clown car. Now every time you open the internet it’s like you’re Thom Yorke in the video for No Surprises, except the fish bowl is filling with rage. That’s a weird metaphor but I’m not thinking straight. I’m mad at tweets and statuses!

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a plea for decorum. Politics affects people’s lives. It’s important. And it’s next to impossible not to lash out when people like Jonathan Coleman are in the news saying just the dumbest shit every half hour.

No, this is a plea for mercy.

This election needs to be over, soon, because it sucks.

SOS.

SOS.

Make it stop.

At the time of writing, there are still eight days, 23 hours, 7 minutes and 30 seconds to go.

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